


This Secret Language

by orphan_account



Category: Push (2009)
Genre: Attempted Seduction, F/M, Not Underage, Short & Sweet
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-30
Updated: 2017-08-30
Packaged: 2018-12-21 14:13:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,744
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11945955
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Nick ran when Cassie made her move. Five years later, she's got to find him fast.





	This Secret Language

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Devil Betty (einfach_mich)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/einfach_mich/gifts).



> For [Devil Betty](https://archiveofourown.org/users/einfach_mich/pseuds/Devil%20Betty), who appreciates the bad!wrong ships even more than I do.
> 
> It's my birthday! Which means I'm going to take my AO3 works count from 39 to 40. You can speculate as to why those particular numbers bear significance. ;-)
> 
> This has a brief depiction of a completely failed attempt on minor!Cassie's part to seduce Nick.
> 
> Title is from [this song.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_KfnGBtVeA)

  
She’d switched to paint, a few years back. Well, paint pens. The transitory nature of her life required easy capping for her tools, and it was hard to move quickly when your materials needed to be rinsed before storing. But she liked the way the paint curled and dragged across the paper, no sharply defined lines like pens or pencils, as liquid and changing as the future itself.

_You suck at drawing._

“But I’m great at painting, Nick,” she replied in a murmur, talking back to the voice she hadn’t heard in five years.

Truth be told, she wasn’t that bad at drawing anymore, either. She’d taken private art lessons, beginning shortly after he’d left her the last time. He’d left her before, of course, plenty of times, taking off into the night, chasing Kira or finding another clue on Division’s weaknesses or just hustling some unsuspecting mark out of a couple hundred dollars. Never without a hurried, “I’ll be back.”

Until the last time, which was the first time she’d gathered up the courage to act on the buzzing awareness she felt dancing in her belly every time they made eye contact, every time he’d give her a weary smile and offer to buy her dinner, every time he ruffled her hair. She’d known how it would turn out—she’d drawn it a thousand times—but sometimes, just as her mother had warned her, when a Watcher wanted something badly enough, they could imagine it happening clearly enough to trick themselves into thinking their daydream was a vision. And the thousand and first time she’d drawn herself crawling into bed with Nick, she’d seen him respond to her overtures as she wanted.

Nick had reacted to her invasion of his bed with an absolute withdrawal, so rapid that he hadn’t even bothered to pull on a shirt before running out of the bedroom and shouting, “What in the hell are you _doing_ , Cassie?”

She rose up on her knees in the center of the mattress, not bothering to button her shirt again. “Don’t pretend you haven’t thought about it. I _know_ you.” She did know him, so well that she also knew exactly how those stray thoughts would have affected him: shame and discomfort quickly masked by a joke and a firm reminder, to himself and to her, of their relative stations in life. She’d just hoped that he could be coaxed past the reminders.

A flicker of expression, so fast that she couldn’t read it, crossed his face, then was gone with the return of wariness.

Seeing it, she misinterpreted the cause, and rose from the bed to saunter towards him. She shrugged the shirt from her shoulders as she advanced. “I’m not thirteen anymore, Nick. Not some little kid you can pat on the head and send off to play.”

Nick swallowed, casting his eyes to the ceiling. “Cassie, stop. This is—this is—”

“Exactly what you want.” Cassie put one finger on the center of his chest and dragged it downward.

Nick’s hand closed around hers before she got past his belly button, stopping it in its path. “Age isn’t just a number, Cassie.”

Cassie had never wished she was a Pusher more than in that moment, a desire which filled her with guilt even as it struck her. “I’ve been on my own since my mom got caught. That makes me an adult.”

“No.” Nick backed to the door, keeping his eyes up, away from her gaze, as mistrustful as if she really were a Pusher. He slipped his feet into his shoes and grabbed his wallet from the letter holder on the wall. “It really, really doesn’t. You’d know that, if you were one.”

The door slammed behind him, and when she finally got up the guts to focus on him, a couple of weeks later, she saw that he had left Hong Kong. She never Watched him again.

The red pen curlicued across the paper. A puddle of blood.

The flashes came, thick and fast now: a woman’s laugh, low and intimate. The drip, drip, drip of a leaky faucet. The number 217. Blue eyes, blinking with slow deliberation as they peered up into her face. Cassie’s hand flew. She dropped the pens to the ground beside her as she finished with each one. At last, the images stilled for a moment (only a moment, she knew they would never stop) and she could see what she’d drawn.

An apartment door with the number 17. Or maybe a hotel room?

A fancy-looking faucet, leaking like the cheaper models.

Nick, lying on the floor and staring up at her with a half-smile, obviously about to pass out. Probably due to the blood he was losing from the wound on his scalp.

Nick.

_Nick._

She’d finally found him again. Not that she’d been looking—humiliation had taken care of that particular urge—but she’d always hoped…

No time for that. He was going to be bleeding like a stuck pig in a matter of minutes. Cassie scrambled for her discarded paints and caps, shoving them into her canvas messenger bag along with her sketchbook.

  


Getting online was always a treacherous path for anybody Division wanted. Search terms as simple as “blue hotel door” could be flagged if the searcher seemed to be looking for a particular door long enough, especially if they kept on adding qualifiers.

Cassie had long since learned the safest bet was to steal a phone. She headed to the nearest coffee shop and “accidentally” spilled a mocha latte on a man she’d seen yelling at the barista while talking to someone on his phone simultaneously. Honestly, if you were going to act like that, you deserved some karmic retribution in the form of a Watcher on a mission. She managed to lift his phone out of his suit jacket pocket before he finished spluttering in outrage.

Once she disabled the GPS and got onto the search widget, she typed in her terms as quickly as she could. You never knew when Division might have started tailing you. Well, maybe if you were a better Watcher than Cassie, you did, but here she was, working with what she had, which was a lot less than what her mother had possessed.

_upscale faucet model_

She flicked through the resulting images, walking faster and checking over her shoulder every once in a while. Finally she found the right one.

_hotel “blue door” “gold numbers” “YeLY faucets”_

There the key words were, highlighted. Third result down, profiled in a customer review site.

“Please don’t be outside of New York, please don’t be outside of New York,” she muttered under her breath, and clicked on the link.

Hotel Grafton.

“Yesss.”

Cassie pulled the battery from the phone, tucking it into her messenger bag, before tossing the phone itself into the nearest garbage can. You never knew when a spare battery might come in handy.

The visions started to become insistent, overlaying what her eyes saw in real time, so that she had to blink them out of the way. Anywhere else but here and Hong Kong, people probably would have been staring at the obviously delusional woman making her way through the park, but no one was looking at anyone’s face on a New York sidewalk.

“I have to be _here_ now,” she complained to herself. There should be a school. Why weren’t there things like Hogwarts for people like them? Instead all they got were the Death Eaters.

_Hey, Cass._

_Nick,_ she nearly replied, before realizing it was part of the vision. That was scary. They usually didn’t come with sounds unless the events were right on the cusp of occurrence. She could see the hotel beneath the trees now, shorter than the other buildings with a discreet awning bearing its name over the front door.

Cassie changed direction slightly, heading for the side and an employee entrance. She leaned against the wall near the door she found, and pretended to be absorbed in searching through her bag until a man in a bellhop uniform left without looking back. That gave her enough of an open door to slip inside and duck behind a pile of folded linens on a table. A maintenance worker hung up his overalls and walked out for a smoke before fifteen minutes passed. He was six inches taller than Cassie but she grabbed the overalls anyway and rolled up the cuffs and sleeves.

Elevators were scary because they were enclosed spaces, but stairwells were even more so. She opted for the service elevator, letting the doors almost close again before jumping through the narrowing gap and hitting the button for the second floor. Once there, she edged out, distracted by the visions of blue eyes blinking at her.

“Two seventeen, two seventeen,” she chanted under her breath. “C’mon, c’mon…”

There it was, door slightly ajar. She paused outside to listen for evidence of a Division capture in progress.

Nothing. Just the _drip drip drip_ of a faucet.

Cassie closed her eyes, watching the pictures on the backs of her eyelids for a second. She couldn’t spy any cameras, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there, just that she wouldn’t see them if she went in. She did see a fire alarm being pulled, though, which seemed like a good idea if she wanted to leave quickly with a wounded man without being noticed. A few seconds later, she found the handle in the hall and shoved it down. The alarm sounded immediately. She turned her face to the wall and moved back to the open door under the guise of following the crowd of hotel guests to the stairs.

A quiet groan reached her ears. Giving in to the inevitable, she pushed the door a little wider and crept through.

A man’s body lay on the floor near the bathroom, surrounded by a pool of blood. Cassie climbed on the bed and held a lighter to the sprinkler above it until it started spraying. Hopefully that would kill any cameras or listening devices. She clambered down, straddled the man, and looked down in disapproval.

He blinked slowly in the downpour, focusing on her face. A flicker of recognition lightened his eyes. “Hey, Cass.”

“Goddammit, Nick.” She crushed the cell phone lying next to his hand beneath the heel of her boot. “How many times do I have to tell you to bring an umbrella?”


End file.
